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[Craig Stern]

There are now draft sprites of most of the character classes. Work continues, but I'm already pretty excited at what Inane's pumping out. Here are three of my current favorites:



On the coding end, I've been reworking certain aspects of how the game handles attacks to make it easier for players to mod in new ones. I've been doing this by adding more attributes to attacks while cutting down on special cases where the game looks for the attack name to provide it unique treatment. Players can now customize all of the following for any given attack:

• element
• attack name
• energy cost
• minimum range
• maximum range
• screen shake magnitude (max number of pixels to make the screen shake per frame upon impact)
• screen shake time (number of frames to shake the screen)
• strength multiplier (coefficient multiplied by the character's Strength stat, then added when calculating the attack's base damage)
• psy power multiplier (same, but for psy power)
• psy defense multiplier (same, but for psy defense)
• backstab factor (damage multiplier to use for backstab attacks; 0 if no backstab damage)
• sidestab factor (damage multiplier to use for sidestab attacks; 0 if no sidestab damage)
• self-heal factor (multiple of the attack's damage that gets added to the attacker's health)
• self-focus factor (multiple of the attack's damage that gets added to the attacker's energy)
• status effect
• primary attack effect (Health or Energy, depending on which the attack damages)
• post-attack effect (ends the turn / lets the character continue moving / lets the character continue moving and attack again)
• in-game description of the attack

The only thing I haven't made customizable yet is the AOE configuration for each attack. I have to remember to do that at some point.

[happymonster]

Sprites look really nice -  I especially like the second one.

[Farmergnome]

Agreed they look fantastic, more plz? 

[ANtY]

Beautiful sprites 

MOR PL0X

[Craig Stern]

More sprites will be arriving shortly!

In the meantime, however, I've made a breakthrough in enemy AI: enemies now plan plan ahead.

...or, to put it in less dramatic terms, they now plan a route to objectives that they cannot reach in a single turn ("objectives," by the way, include weakened enemy characters that they want to knock off). In Capture the Flag, the CPU will now go after your flag even when its units are nowhere near it--likewise, in Last Man Standing, the CPU will now pursue you aggressively across the map no matter how far away your units are.

The AI still needs work, particularly in terms of defensive maneuvers--notably, the CPU currently makes no effort to get units out of range when they are in mortal danger (unless a unit has super-low HP, in which case it will make a beeline for the nearest healer). Still, this is a big step forward, and I'm feeling pretty good about it.

[Craig Stern]

Now that enemies have some semblance of intelligence, I've decided to return to working on over-the-internet multiplayer. My first order of business is to create a class that can go through an array and reproduce a player's turn exactly, action for action. This is actually pretty similar to the class that handles computer AI, only I don't use all of the functions that choose which actions to take: those choices are already made. So it's actually easier. The only tricky part has been ensuring that randomized events (die rolls and such) play out the same way every time. It's coming along smoothly so far, however.

Once I've got the replay functionality complete, it'll be time to make the game actually record the events of a player's turn as they happen, then write them to an external XML file at the conclusion of the turn. The step after that will be to have the game import these XML files and feed them to the replay class, reproducing the other player's turn. That's the basic outline of how I'm proceeding with this. More to come!

[Craig Stern]

My, what do we have here? It looks like an assassin, an engineer, a photokineticist, a pyrokineticist, a shadowling and a stone golem!

[happymonster]

Looking good, but the first two especially look a little flat, the others had more of a 3D shape due to the lighting/shading.

[ANtY]

and a stone golem!

[Franklins Ghost]

Characters are looking awesome

[Craig Stern]

Thanks, guys!

I've done some more tweaking of the game:

• you can now customize AOE for different attacks
• you can now customize different types of particle effects for when a character or destructible object is hit with an attack (variations currently in-game: sparks, blood, stone chunks and wood chunks)
• some performance improvements for when the computer AI is thinking (I'll need to do more of this at some point--it currently hangs for a second when thinking of long-term strategies on the medium-sized and larger maps)
• gave the Swordsman class a Double Strike attack to make up for ditching Slash and Whirlwind

I'd love to show you the rest of the character sprites, but they're being revised at the moment. I'm aiming to have all of the rest pose sprites done and in the game before the deadline to submit to Indiecade. (I figure that of all the games I'm likely to make, this is the one best-suited to a head-to-head match-up on an arcade machine.)

[Craig Stern]

Small update today: the turn reproduction class can now move characters, launch attacks, and end their turns.

I also went back and redid the start menu a bit. You can now select Local Match (hotseat multiplayer with CPU and/or friends) or Email Match, and the type of game you selected gets passed along when the match starts and determines whether the game will record actions during each player's turn to produce a turn file. I'm just getting started on the turn recording class itself, however. I'll have more updates soon!

[Craig Stern]

Turn recording now works for moving, attacking, and ending the turn; the game formats and saves an XML file with each of these actions, in order, at the conclusion of a player's turn when in play-by-email mode.

In other news, I have officially spent a ridiculous amount of time fixing two really dumb mistakes that made it into the code I wrote last night. I think I need to impose a moratorium on late-night coding.

[Craig Stern]

EUREKA! After doing a bunch of digging around on the internet and experimenting with code, I've finally discovered how to have AIR silently save each player's turn files to a directory of my choice (as opposed to opening up a Save File dialog window every single time a turn ends).

Due to a weird security limitation in AIR, however, I can't actually save the turn files to a subdirectory of the folder that the game is actually installed in. Thus, I've chosen the second-best location available: Documents\My Games\Telepath Tactics, consistent with the edict put forth by Lord John Walker on the 24th of January in the two thousand and twelfth year of the Common Era.

[Craig Stern]

Drum roll, please...we now have sprites for the hulking Bronze Golem and the giant-mantis-riding Cavalry!